Merc's Useful Tools of the day

[jtr1962]

Does AI also explain why Amazon's search engine is so awful? It used to be when I looked for something, only results for exactly what the search terms were would come in. Now I get mostly unrelated results.

It's been that way with Google for a while also. I don't care what AI might think I'm actually searching for, especially when it prioritizes hits which try to sell me stuff.

I also hate the "featured" results where people pay to have their products show up at the top of search results. Search results should be sorted by relevance, not by who's paying the most money.

 

[Mercutio]

Everyone should be blocking advertising at all times and on all devices. I don't think this is a controversial thought.

Amazon does seem to have an issue with prioritizing certain products, but I can't tell if that's because of ads or favoring its own products over those of others.

 

[LunarMist]

Searching on Amazon is terrible. I think mostly the sellers put in various BS terms so their goods rise to the top. When you search by ratings, some items suddenly disappear for no good reaason.

AI search is terrible since it treats you like a child. When I'm looking for a particular product or component, I don't need a lesson or adverts for vaguely similar products.

 

[Mercutio]

I just noticed that Amazon has a new thing called Rufus (which means "Red-Haired" as in "beat him like a red-headed stepchild"), which for some reason is its answer to Gemini or Grok or Copilot. I'm not sure WHY Amazon needs an AI assistant, but it officially has one, and it's different from Alexa, the thing it already had.

As far as AI search, I have Gemini turned on my phone and I can't meaningfully tell the difference between having it and having the standard Google Assistant. It may be that my commands are usually pretty precise or it may be that Gemini doesn't do anything but waste additional electricity to get to the same place as the old service.

I don't see "Search AI" as helpful at all, although I have found that feeding code snippets into ChatGPT and asking it to produce working equivalent code in other languages useful.

 

[LunarMist]

Rufus (rufous) is for red, commonly used to describe the color of feathers in the species name, e.g., Selasphorus rufus.

 

[Mercutio]

Remember a couple months back when I linked to an absolutely insane ~800GB collection of DOS games?

86Box the tool to use with them. It's a specialized hypervisor that includes ROM dumps so that deeply specific hardware can be fully emulated. So your VM isn't just a Pentium 2 with a generic SVGA card and a SoundBlaster, it's Pentium 2 with a Voodoo 3000 and an AWE32. Since it is a complete emulator, it should be able to run period-appropriate OSes like OS/2 and BeOS as well as funky gaming stuff.

And since I just went and looked, here's the WinWorld archive of pretty much every OS. AIX x86? Pick? Tru64? Yuuuuup. Want to see unreleased beta Windows versions like Longhorn? They're there. Some of these, I've always wanted to try just to say that I have.

 

[sedrosken]

A word of warning: the CPU you can emulate is pretty directly tied to your single-thread performance. My 5700X balks at maintaining 100% execution speed on anything stronger than roughly a Pentium 233 MMX.

 

[Mercutio]

Fortunately, most people probably aren't looking for an authentic Slot A with GeForce MX experience since stuff was pretty uniform on Win32 by then.

 

[Mercutio]

I tested the Massgrave.dev scripts by activating a trial version of Visio 2021 on an unactivated Windows 11 Pro for Workstations system on the worst Windows 11-capable laptop I have on hand.

Just do this in an elevated powershell:

irm https://get.activated.win | iex
or
irm https://massgrave.dev/get | iex

~10 keystrokes later both Windows and Visio were activated with retail licenses. The Massgrave scripts are open source. You can see what they do from their github page. I looked through the 450kb shell script and while I have to admit I'm not doing a security audit, I could follow along with it. I am not suggesting these replace organizational licenses for anyone else but if someone is just spinning up a system at home, here you go.